My second fanfiction is here! After all the lessons I've learned writing A Fresh Start it's time to create an all-new story. This one has lots of potential since there's plenty of room to grow. A Fresh Start was confined by its setting since there weren't many survivors at that point, but there are many more survivors five years in as opposed to eight years in the apocalypse. Anyway on with the show!


The sun shone through the shitty window of Clementine's room in Wellington. Her eyes were struggling to open in her morning haze. When she finally opened her eyes she saw the same thing she always did. The usual mess awaited her, in Wellington, the housing was inside shipping containers any actual buildings were for shops or markets. The inside of the container was a faded blue, with various patches of rust along the inside. What little belongings she had were under her twin-sized bed in a box. She decided to pull out the box for old time's sake and saw Kenny's hat, the picture she drew of Kenny's family all the way back from the motel, and the picture of Lee.

She quickly slid the box back under her bed when she heard Aj was up and running around in the container next door. Clementine made her way over to the next-door container and watched Aj spring up and about all over the place.

"Hey goofball," Clementine smiled.

Aj turned and looked at her before going back to jumping on the bed. He still hadn't been talking, although Edith said it was normal that Einstein didn't speak until he was five or something around that. When he finally settled down Clementine got him ready to go to the school and daycare that Wellington had.

She left the container duplex, went outside, and felt the cold air on her face. The sky was covered in dark clouds that painted the environment with a low light that made it feel warm and cozy. Clementine took a deep breath and turned towards the daycare. She dropped him off and went to school next door. The school was made from a modified bunker that belonged to the founder of Wellington, a man named Viktor who had been prepared for the apocalypse. While the school building was fireproof and bulletproof, it was basic. There was no heat or a heat source inside and there were no tables or benches or doors. There was a large classroom and a few smaller classrooms. All was pretty much quiet, with the exception of the occasional alarm when one of the adults teaching was called to help deal with a situation along the wall. There had been two deaths because of that, one teacher and a student close to graduation.

She opened the door and descended the stairs and made her way down the hall to a small classroom at the very end of it. Her first class was Precalculus and she wasn't sure if she was completely prepared for it. Before fully stepping into the room she thought she heard someone call her name, she looked over her shoulder and saw a man who smiled and chuckled, it was Nico. His curly hair was shining under the obnoxiously bright fluorescent lights that also made his white shirt appear lifeless as if flour could fade. She walked over to a desk and sat down. Then a tall man walked in, about a year older than she was, and waved at her. His red collared shirt was dulled by the fluorescent lights like Nico's.

"Hey Jack," she called.

"Hey," he replied.

"Is Nico still in the hallway?" she asked.

"He forgot to give his little brother something so he had to run up the flights of stairs," he chuckled.

Two minutes later Nico appeared in the classroom sweating heavily.

"Oh jeez," Jack recoiled.

"You know I'm not exactly a track star jackass," Nico coughed.

"Oh come on bro don't get like this!" Jack exclaimed.

They argued for a few minutes and as they did their classmates arrived and took seats since class was about to start. Their teacher arrived soon after and she wanted silence. The teacher grabbed a cane and pushed Nico and Jack apart.

"I am telling you to stop, kids, that's enough, if you really want to be aggressive then you can volunteer for wall duty after school," she said.

The rest of the day was almost as slow as a walker with school draining Clementine's interest. The most eventful thing was Nico and Jack exchanging glances and poking each other in the sides.

When school finally let out Clementine, Nico and Jack were on their way to the wall to volunteer for walker duty. Clementine was the one who suggested it, she wasn't too keen on being sheltered and losing the survival skills she had. Nico and Jack had rudimentary survival skills since they were in a larger group before they came to Wellington and never really had to step up.

Even though they didn't really do anything they still had grim and depressing stories. Near the beginning, they had gone out looking for shelter at a half-destroyed supermarket and got swarmed. The images of people trying to be brave and take out the walkers although they had basically run right into the teeth of the swarm and were devoured. Their group's morale had essentially been shattered with the rest of the survivors adopting the mottos 'if things go to shit and you can get away, get away, never come back' and 'be a machete first, bandage second kind of person'. Clementine agreed with that last statement, if she had known that when she was 9 then she probably would've fought against the stranger harder and not been taken as easily or at all.

Clementine snapped back to reality as they reached the wall. An old black man with graying hair stood behind the desk. He wore a pin-striped button shirt with a bright red cardigan like something Mr. Rogers would wear.

"Hey Bryce we're here to volunteer for wall duty," Jack told him.

Bryce's dull gray eyes looked as if they could bore holes through Nico almost as if scanning him for any malfeasance.

"Sure thing," Bryce said.

He gave them weapons that were registered under their names since Wellington didn't exactly have a second amendment since there were plenty of mentally ill people in the apocalypse. Jack's machete was in a sleek black sheath that he slung over his back. Nico grabbed his baseball bat and his shitty homemade sheath that could barely support his baseball bat.

The gates screeched open and they quickly left and started going around the wall and beating off any abundance of walkers putting too much strain on the wall. After a while of walking, they started to see the bodies of long-dead walkers littering the area. The sound of groaning and hisses alerted them to nearby walkers.

They slunk closer so Clementine, Nico, and Jack started taking out walkers. but that soon stopped when the number started to get out of hand. Nico and Clementine were separated from Jack when a plate from the wall flew over and split them apart. Walkers quickly coveted the new space and Jack was being herded by the walkers towards a corner.

"Shit! I could use some help!" Jack cried as a walker almost bit him.

Clementine kicked a few walkers back and managed to get to cover behind a crate.

"I'm a little occupied over here!" Clementine shouted.

Jack started to feel a rush of adrenaline as a walker grabbed his hand. He cut its hand off and started slashing their heads off with a renewed resolve.

Nico's wooden bat wasn't really hurting the walkers, it was like hitting a stone with a wood plank and expecting it to break the rock. An additional problem was his precarious position. He wasn't really sure how to kill them without swinging at full force and possibly falling over, and he didn't want to do that and get eaten, if that happened, it'd be game over. Hitting the walkers and managing to get out of the way was hard enough without worrying about the condition of the bat, that's what made the walkers so deadly, they could take beatings no matter what, what if your weapon isn't hitting the brain then you're screwed.

Clementine noticed that Nico's bat was failing, but there wasn't anything she could do all she had was a knife. She was about to help him get to cover when she caught sight of someone standing at the top of the hill looking down on them. He had walker guts covered on him and easily could've been mistaken for one by anyone up on the wall. There was no way he was younger than forty, even at that distance, she could see the age lines on his face. It seemed like the man had long hair, a beard, and even something covering his left eye. Although as Clementine was about to get a closer look, Nico had been grabbed by a walker. She quickly stabbed it through its eye and turned to look back at the man, but he had vanished.

Another plate from the wall fell off and quickly called her attention back to the problem at hand. There was now a hole in the wall big enough for a walker to enter.

"Jack are you still alive?" Clementine shouted.

"Yeah," Jack coughed.

He was still swinging his machete as droves of walkers had been flocking to him.

"I'll try to cover Nico he's gonna squeeze through the hole and run to the gate and tell Bryce about it," Clementine told him.

Nico briefly frowned at having been signed up for this and let out an exasperated sigh.

"Fine," he grumbled.

"Now's your chance, Nico," Jack exclaimed.

Nico bolted towards the gate, but they were at the very back wall of the community so he had to run through the whole community.

"Clem I'm actually getting nervous about not making it out of this alive!" Jack trembled.

"It's only been about two minutes," Clementine replied.

"And we've killed about fifty of them," Jack pointed out.

They could see a man in a brown coat with a slick gray shirt and faded blue jeans coming up to the wall.

"G'day mates," he said.

"Oh thank God John!" Jack chuckled.

"Yeah, our chum Nico got me," John said, "Got some crates to push against the wall so we can plug the hole for now."

"Yeah and the jackass is making us push them," a man groaned.

"Oh c'mon you're doing swell Naz," John chuckled, "Your grandmum would be so proud."

John looked back and whipped out his magnum revolver to shoot the walkers and give Clementine and Jack time to get through the hole before they plugged it up. Once inside they helped Naz push the crate against the wall.

Jack and Clem sat on the ground completely exhausted.

"Damn how'd that even go unnoticed for so long?" Jack asked.

"How the bloody hell should I know?" John replied, "I suppose none of our good chaps actually did maintenance back there for a while."

"Y'all can discuss this yourselves I'm going back to my place," Naz grumbled.

As he turned around a loud boom echoed from the front of Wellington followed by screams.